“…companies that had formerly sought to retain employees
through downturns now no longer had the reserves to do so. they had
likewise ceased to invest in new equipment, normally a traditional move
in slow periods.”

It is hard to say whether The Forgotten Man is
a very good book, or a rather boring and rambling one. I like it very much, it contains
endless verbal photographs, in date order, relating to the Great Depression
in the USA between 1927 and 1940.

The book wanders across the confused, inconsistent
and largely ineffectual response of the American government to the Great
Depression. Every now and then, with a very light hand, there is inserted
a gentle observation on macro-economics.

I have a very marked preference for facts over opinion,
and this book provides that. It is interesting to see the beginnings of
very recent problems in the American economy originating in Roosevelt’s
socialism.

It was he who was responsible for setting up Fanny
Mae, and for giving untramelled power to the corrupt and ruthless
unions that have seen the American Big Three motor (and other) corporations
lurch from crisis to crisis ever since.

The seeds of government safety nets, such as Medicare
and Welfare, which the American state has struggled with ever since, also
took root during the Depression.

The pseudo-intellectuals often admired, and tried to
learn from, the likes of Mussolini and Stalin. The disputes between intellectualism
and pragmatism and between statism
and individualism continue to shape and confuse modern society right
into this new century.

“The sorry state of villages like Semlevo is the result of "negative
social selection", says Ms Nefedova: the most active and able people
have migrated to large towns. Few people have stayed behind, and most
of those are unable to work. In Semlevo there is only one farmer who
keeps his own sheep and chickens. Most houses there have no running
water, plumbing or gas heating. Still, Semlevo’s old collective
farm is considered lucky: it was recently bought by a businesswoman
from Moscow. Most other collective farms in this district are dead.

“Russia’s demography befits a country at war. The population
of 142m is shrinking by 700,000 people a year. By 2050 it could be down
to 100m. The death rate is double the average for developed countries.
The life expectancy of Russian males, at just 60 years, is one of the
lowest in the world. Only half of Russian boys now aged 16 can expect
to live to 60, much the same as at the end of the 19th century.”
—
“…Now large swathes of land in Siberia and the far east
are emptying out as people move to central Russia. The population density
in the country’s far east is 1.1 people per square kilometre.
On the other side of the border with China it is nearly 140 times that
figure”
—
“In the past couple of years the rules have become more accommodating
and migrant workers can now apply for their own work permits and sign
contracts with their employers. But for tax reasons only a quarter of
immigrants do so. The new law has increased the number of legal migrants
to more than 2m, but the real figure is thought to be five times that.”

It is worse than sad to watch UK leftists for
ever attempting to use the country and troubles for political advantage.

“A helpful rule of thumb for assessing the fanfare that habitually
precedes a Gordon Brown initiative, is that there will be less to it
than meets the eye. Under scrutiny, these things tend to come apart
in our hands, shot through with failures of nerve and riddled with second
thoughts.”

You can see the same sort of leftist amoral eagerness
to exploit the country's problems from Obama’s chief of staff.

9th
November 2008
“ "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," Mr. [Rahm]
Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. "They are opportunities
to do big things." ”

“You weakened the pound, Gordon, because you expanded the public
sector without reforming it.

“You weakened the pound because you bloated the state pay-roll,
and then you added the private finance initiative and the nationalisation
of the Bradford & Bingley and Northern
Rock, and all the time you somehow believed your own lunatic propaganda
that you had personally defied the laws of economic gravity.

“You really thought you had created a new paradigm in which you,
and only you, had beaten the economic cycle and gone "beyond boom
and bust", and that you were therefore free to take whatever fiscal
risks you wanted, and the markets looked at the whole thing, sucked
their teeth and said, baloney.”

“A bright blue line divides Labour and the Conservatives over
the acceptable level of borrowing and the role of the State. Mr Osborne
portrays the Prime Minister as a political version of a short-seller,
constantly borrowing more money in the hope that his gamble will eventually
pay off. By giving warning of a run on a pound, he was simply giving
a vivid illustration of the dangers of government debt. His aim is to
give the voters a clear choice at the next election between tax cuts
funded by savings and tax reductions paid for by borrowing.”

“Their remarks reflected the strong Treasury view that next
week’s tax cut and spending package from the Chancellor, Alistair
Darling, must be accompanied by evidence that he intends to get soaring
borrowing back on course over the medium term. That should mean tax
rises, spending cuts or both.”

And lastly, more from Boris:

“Why does the Government still spend £800 million on advertising
public sector appointments - very often in the Guardian - when they
could be conveniently displayed online?”

Hey, why is the Groaniad [the Guardian] not reporting
on the Clown’s lying and incompetence?

There is little doubt in my mind that Obama is, amongst
other serious problems, corrupt, a conman and a demagogue. I have started
to notice a strange pattern when this topic is broached in conversation. Those
that prefer Obama tend to respond with something along the lines
of “McCain is just as bad” or “all politicians are corrupt/lie”.
This is a amazing example of the power of the socialist policy of language
corruption developed by Goebbels, ‘popularised’ by Orwell,
and employed by Obama and his friends in the fossil media. In particular,
these attitudes demonstrate the successful use of three standard socialist
techniques of opinion manipulation:

“the big lie”

meaning generalisation and

moral equivalence.

The big lie:

Say something outrageously counter to reality often
enough, and people will start to believe it. A prime example from the
Obama-McCain campaign was the constant repetition that “McCain
is just more of the same as Bush”.

Meaning generalisation

The idea is to make the meaning of a problematic
word apply to so many situations that it becomes impossible to use that
word to precisely describe the actions of the troublemaker. In this
case, the idea of “corrupt” is distorted out of all recognition.
Thus, it becomes impossible to discuss the real behaviour of someone
who has spent their whole political career seeped in graft [Obama],
when the term also come to apply to someone who has spent their whole
political career fighting graft [McCain].

Moral equivalence

“They are all as bad as each other”
and, thus, “no judgement can be made”. This is the ‘principle’
behind politically ‘correct’ language. This technique acts
in three ways to protect society’s worst:

It inhibits the use of clear descriptive terms, so that the behaviour
of the socialists cannot be discussed with clarity.

It encourages apathy towards to the problem of stopping the socialists,
because if they are all the same, there is no point doing anything.

It dishonestly reduces the credibility of those who attempt to
clean up the problems, because they must be just as bad as the socialists.

So is McCain really somehow equivalent to Obama in
terms of dishonesty and corruption?

Here is the reality:

Obama built his political career
by working his way up through the corrupt Chicago ‘Democratic’ machine.
Chicago/Illinois corruption is renowned and clearly runs from Mayor Daley’s
office. Mayor Daley’s brother is currently under criminal indictment indictment
and, in one election, Daley was forced to run without a supporting slate because
all his main helpers were either under indictment or convicted. An indication
of how far Obama rose in this sewer is his appropriation of top Daley strategist,
David Axelrod.

McCain, meanwhile, built
his political career fighting corruption both within his party and generally,
including sending members of his party to jail for a multi-billion dollar
bid-rigging and bribery scam.

Obama is one of the heaviest
earmarkers in the Senate, averaging around 1 million dollars per day during
his 2-year term. Many of these earmarks have already been clearly linked
to matching campaign contributions - that is, the contributions were bribes.

McCain does not take
earmarks and has campaigned for years to ban this egregious form of corruption.

Obama is a top recipient of Fannie
Mae/Freddie Mac contributions, despite only being a senator for two years.
The corruption and sweet-heart deals of the FMs [Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac] are
at the heart of current housing and credit problems in the US. Obama employed
two ex-CEOs of Fannie Mae - both resigned in disgrace due to shady accounting
practices (known as “fraud” in plain English). Jim Johnson was appointed
as one of three people on Obama’s VP search committee; and Franklin Raines
acted as a housing and mortgage advisor. Note that in both cases, Obama attempted
to cover up and deny the connections once they became inconvenient, much as
he did with his long-term black-supremacist preacher, Jeremiah Wright and with
domestic terrorist and Obama’s long-term political ally, Bill Ayers.

McCain attempted to force regulation
on the FMs and repeatedly warned of their behaviour, but was blocked by the
‘Democrats’ in Congress, led by one of the top FM largesse recipients,
Barney Franks. Franks shut down debate by threatening a campaign painting as
racists any who attempting to stop the FM corruption.

Tony Rezko has been convicted on 16 federal bribery
and fraud charges. Rezko was Obama’s
top campaign fund-raiser and a close advisor. Rezko and
Obama bought two halves of a piece of land On the same day. For some reason Obama paid
under value for his half and Rezko paid over value for his. Then later,
Rezko sold cheaply part of his half to Obama. In an amazing coincidence,
Rezko obtained a series of government contracts in Obama’s district
to build housing for the poor. Rezko’s convictions relate to his
deliberate sub-standard building, and to defrauding of his poor and often
ignorant tenants. In other words, Obama took bribes to aid and abet the
defrauding and endangerment of his poorest constituents. Of course, Obama
claims to be on the side of the poor.

Obama claims to support
“Sunshine in Government” attempts to force corruption into
the light. However, in his campaign he sued, and threatened to sue, bloggers
and news organizations publishing information that he did not want publicised.

McCain has consistently
campaigned and voted for Sunshine policies, including the “McCain-Feingold”
act.

Obama disabled the standard
anti-fraud credit card checks on his campaign contribution website, allowing
anyone to get around the election laws limiting individual donations,
undeclared donations and donations from foreign nationals, as well as
enabling simple identity theft frauds. By co-incidence, he managed to
haul in over 600 million dollars in contributions.

McCain has campaigned and
voted to both reduce money in political campaigns, and to increase the
openness. This is at the heart of the “McCain-Feingold” campaign
finance reform act. He also promised to, and then stuck to the federal matching
limits for presidential campaign financing. Obama also promised to do
this, but then broke that promise. Of course, McCain’s website kept
the standard anti-fraud checks turned on.

Obama selected a well-known
buffoon as his running mate (Joe Biden), someone who also happens to be
heavily involved in earmark corruption - he has requested more than 250
million dollars of earmarks for 2009 alone.

McCain selected a proven
anti-corruption reformer as his running mate (Sarah Palin), someone who’s
80%+ approval rating - the highest of any governor in the union - comes
from her political history of fighting the corruption in her own state
Republican party, including sending some members to jail for graft. Compare
this to Obama’s handling of his state party’s corruption.

Obama worked for Acorn as a lawyer,
funded Acorn activities via his committees, and then contributed to Acorn from
his campaign funds. Acorn is under federal election fraud indictment in most
states of the union for systematically paying people to fraudulently register
to vote. In a particularly impressive example, they claimed that for this campaign
they submitted approximately 1.5 million registrations in Ohio. In fact, they
submitted around 600 thousand. Of those, over two thirds were found to be fraudulent.
To add icing to the cake, the ‘Democratic’ Secretary of State, Jennifer
Brunner, refused to pass on her department’s analysis of the fraudulent
registrations to the counties - thus making it inevitable that the non-existent
voters would remain on the roles. (This is one of the reasons that I put ‘Democratic’
Party in quotes.)

Clearly the idea that McCain
is just as corrupt or dishonest as Obama is absurd. Just as clearly, the
big lie employed by the fossil media and the rest of Obama’s campaign
has made this absurdity a ‘fact’ in many people’s minds.

brown the clown is to star in a new multibillion blockbuster film - ‘carry on lying’

“ "If I am right that wise people do not know the answer
to the problem the world faces, it is surely folly for our leaders to
pretend that they do. In normal times, one puts up with quite a lot
of dishonesty from politicians, but in the face of this slump, it is
truly dangerous, because it means that trust cannot be restored.

“In the past 14 months, Mr Brown has shifted his rhetoric a bit,
but always in the wake of events. Rather than doing what the markets
call "kitchen-sinking", and putting the whole enormous problem
before us, he prefers over-optimistic forecasts, and boasts about how
well placed we are. (Our household debt, by the way, is nearly twice
as much as the European average.)” [Quoted from telegraph.co.uk]

“Britain is heading for a "collapse of sterling" if
Gordon Brown persists with trying to borrow his way out of trouble,
George Osborne says in an interview with The Times today.”
—
“The pound yesterday slipped to a 13-year low against a basket
of other currencies. The dollar rate fell to below $1.48 and the euro
rate to €1.17, a record low, capping its biggest weekly fall against
the single currency.” [timesonline.co.uk]

I watched the election coverage. Polls closed at 7pm, and John Key’s
acceptance speech was at about 12pm. Helen Clark made a concession speech
before this.

Over here, people are more relaxed about what they say. One United Future
(part of the right coalition) MP won a constituency seat, but as the party
got less that 1% of the party vote, he is the only one in that party who
got a seat. So he was referred to as ‘Noddy No Mates’ by the
presenter!

One of the panel said that slogan for Labour in this election, “This
one’s about trust” depended on the attempt to dig dirt on
Key, and thus portray him as untrustworthy, being successful. It all backfired.
It appears that Labour had intended to manipulate voters into voting against
Key.

Another story that paid a bit part in this election was that of Winston
Peters. He accepted money from a billionaire who was hoping for a government
role in Monaco, but didn’t declare it. The voters did not believe
his various explanations about why he didn’t declare the money.
Nor did they believe that Helen Clark did not know that Winston Peters
was acting improperly. The voters were not impressed when Helen Clark
didn’t fire Winston Peters from his cabinet position, and didn’t
rule herself out of working with him in the future. His party got just
under 5% of the vote, and he didn’t come close to winning his seat,
so he and his party are out.

There were lots of tears in the Labour camp. Clark in her speech referred
to a ‘Cause’ they were all working for. Key in his speech
said that New Zealand could do better - this is not as good as it gets.
He said he will lead a government that valued individual achievement,
and “What will determine success is the unity of purpose –
a willingness to work together while recognising that our collective success
rests on the success of individuals”. Key won his seat with about
22,000 votes, the next closest was about 5,000.

Also heard, something that sums up New Zealanders’ attitudes amongst
unionized and disappointed Labour supporters. “Well maybe John Key
will make us rich”.

National will probably not just be in coalition with ACT and UnitedFuture,
but also with the Maori party. This gives the coalition, as a whole, more
chance of winning the next election in 3 years time. Party leaders and
panel acknowledged that this is going to be a hard time to be Prime Minister
- due to the world economic problems. Also with Maori onboard, National
will not have to rely on ACT support. A commentator suggests that the
Maori could propose less palatable policies - like ending the dole!

kiwiblog
is the best New Zealand political blog I have come across. The writer
asks, “What will I blog about now Winston Peters has gone?”
Also on the blog, I read that National made a smart political move in
ruling out a deal with NZ First (Winston Peter’s party). This showed
that a vote for NZ First, which has supported National party in the past,
was a vote for Labour. And a vote for Labour, who wanted to keep Winston
on side, was a vote for more nonsense from Winston.

“John Key’s conservative National Party easily won power
in New Zelaland, known internationally for its pristine environment
and as the backdrop to the 'Lord of the Rings' movies.

“ "Today, New Zealand has spoken, in their hundreds of thousands,
and they have voted for change," Key told supporters at a victory
celebration in Auckland.

“The National Party looked unlikely to have gained an outright
majority in parliament but is assured of assuming power due to the support
of the small free-market ACT party.

“When final counts were received from all polling stations, National
had 45 per cent of the vote and Labour had 34 percent. That would translate
into 59 seats for National in a 122-seat parliament, up 48 seats from
the previous parliament, compared to Labour’s 43, a fall from
49. The ACT Party won 5 seats and the centrist United Future, which
also offered support for National, took one." ”

“Initial failures in Iraq acted like a solar eclipse, blocking
the light on every other achievement. But those achievements, with the
eclipse finally passing, are considerable by the measure of any presidency.
Because of the passage of Medicare Part D, nearly 10 million low-income
seniors are receiving prescription drugs at little or no cost. No Child
Left Behind education reform has helped raise the average reading scores
of fourth-graders to their highest level in 15 years, and narrowed the
achievement gap between white and African American children. The President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has helped provide treatment for more
than 1.7 million people and compassionate care for at least 2.7 million
orphans and vulnerable children. And the decision to pursue the surge
in Iraq will be studied as a model of presidential leadership.”
—
“Before the Group of Eight summit in 2005, the White House senior
staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa
for reasons of cost and ideology -- a measure designed to save hundreds
of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy
meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States,
shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized.
I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification
with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former
slave, the Burmese women's advocatec…”